Maryland

Actually, I was considering another word, Kafkaesque, which the ever-helpful Wikipedia describes as "...marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity...". Well, perhaps that's a bit harsh.

But the Maryland Archives are the most convoluted and user-unfriendly collections that I've yet to come across. (And if memory serves, they weren't that way when I last used them, about two years ago. That's progress for you!).

If you want to find something here, I suggest using the Maryland Archives search function, which isn't half bad. You can try navigating their menus, of course, but all I can say there is good luck.

To make matters worse, Maryland requires a username and password to access much of its content. Why they would do this is beyond me, but it seems that the guest username aaco and password aaco# will work in many cases, but for some collections, such as Wills, you need to apply for a separate password.

OK. Now that I'm done whining, it's time to acknowledge that there's a lot of great content here, for family history or general history research, or for anyone just curious to know more about Maryland's heritage. There's no easy way to summarize what's here, so let me just highlight a few key resources:

The Site Index is a good place to begin perusing; it's a listing for the entire Archives (not just online materials), but it's still a good overview. It's too large to list it all here, but here are the "A" listings, just to give you an idea:

(Try accessing the Annapolis City Directory if you want to get an idea of how clumsy this site can be....whoops...I said I was done whining, didn't I?)

An easy to overlook
resource are the Maryland State Archives Indices, which include some of the best family history lookup tools the state has to offer. There is a lot of genealogical information scattered about: